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By Faheem Lawal
Stakeholders have renewed calls for stronger collaboration between government and the private sector to accelerate development in grassroots communities across Nigeria.
Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Media, Public Communication and Public Engagement, Sunday Dare, made the call at the Gazelle News Annual Lecture in Lagos, where he emphasised that public-private partnerships at the grassroots level go far beyond the conventional focus on roads and bridges.
Delivering the keynote address at the event, themed “Driving Grassroots Governance with Public-Private Partnerships: The Pains and the Prospects,” Dare said public-private partnership is a governance philosophy, one that brings government, private businesses, civil society and local communities together to solve problems that public resources alone cannot fix.
“While government cannot do everything alone, it must ensure that everything gets done,” he noted.
Dare highlighted the benefits of such collaboration for Nigeria’s development. According to him, these include “private capital filling the gap left by limited budgets, a private-sector push for efficiency and timely delivery, tech-driven innovation in agriculture and education, jobs for local youth and women-led businesses, and perhaps most importantly a chance to rebuild public trust whenever a partnership actually delivers a functioning clinic or a working borehole.”
He also expressed optimism, pointing to Nigeria’s youthful population and growing digital economy as the foundation for a future where local councils operate on real-time data to track school performance, hospital bed occupancy and agricultural yields in partnership with young local innovators.
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Dare proposed a new partnership compact built on five priorities: professionalising local government institutions, establishing transparent and competitive procurement frameworks, ensuring communities are active participants rather than passive beneficiaries, deploying technology to drive accountability, and measuring success by improvements in human dignity rather than abstract metrics.
Publisher of Gazelle News, Rasak Musbau, said the annual lecture series consistently focuses on issues critical to national development, adding that this year’s edition centred on grassroots communities because they “supply the highest number of votes during elections, but they are always left behind in the area of development.”
He called on the government to create an enabling environment backed by appropriate legislation and by-laws, alongside stronger coordination between the public and private sectors.
Musbau described himself as a grassroots reporter for nearly two decades, saying he had covered almost every local government area in Lagos State and found that “most of the grassroots communities are not well developed.”
A representative of the organising media organisation, Adetutu Audu-Adebisi, said the lecture was designed to set a public agenda around grassroots development.
“The federal government cannot do it alone,” she said, urging communities to identify and hold their local government chairmen and councillors accountable.
“If you want development in your community, you should be able to work with your local government chairman. We don’t have to wait for the federal government,” she said.
